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PARTISAN REVIEW
that the modern dancer has a firmer purchase on the mantle of
morality. Ballet, in other words, may not be immoral, it's just
"amoral." Certainly, compared with the socially-engaged modern
dances of the politically active thirties (Charles Weidman's "Lynch
Town" for example) or the sort of recent work performed under the
auspices of Dancers for Disarmament, classical ballet may not seem
especially concerned with "moral" matters.
But the ethical underpinnings of classical ballet transcend par–
ticular causes or advocacies. The morality of ballet is a morality of
form - not content - a morality implicit in the very nature of classi–
cal technique (a moral reconditioning, if you will, that penetrates to
the very heart of habit). The pioneer modern dancers eagerly dis–
missed classical technique as impersonal and mechanical. To which
the balletomane Andre Levinson replied, "You may ask whether I
am suggesting that the dancer is a machine? But most certainly!-a
machine for manufacturing beauty." But not just beauty, or at least
not beauty in the abstract. "To make a dancer of a graceful child,"
notes Levinson, "it is necessary to begin by dehumanizing him, or
rather by overcoming the habits of ordinary life." And to the balleto–
mane, ordinary life is slack, both morally and aesthetically .
The moral dimension of this physical reconditioning is par–
ticularly evident in the writings of the Russian balletomane A.
K.
Volinsky. In his
Book of Exultation,
he argues that the verticality or
uprightness of classical ballet is endowed with profoundly
moral
con–
notations. Indeed, throughout the history of Western civilization,
the concept of uprightness has been synonymous with honesty . "The
Greeks," he notes, "set the vertical in opposition to the bent and
crooked, not only in geometrical but in the comprehensive and
spiritual meaning of the word. To see straight, to speak straight - all
this is at once pictorially sensible and heroic. An upright city is a city
of good and high morals that rests firmly on its foundation in a state
of political and economic welfare .. .. Only in ballet do we possess
all aspects of the vertical in its exact mathematically formed, univer–
sally perceptible expression . Everything in ballet is straight, up–
right . . .."
Uprightness is also synonymous with openness, and balletic
turnout - the principle upon which all classical training rests–
serves to "open" or reveal the dancer to the audience that constitutes
his public. (We might think of this as an aesthetics offull disclosure.)
The outwardly focused nature of ballet is a theme that weaves its
